PP deputy Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo warned this Wednesday that the intervention of the email and cell phone of the Attorney General, Álvaro García Ortiz, ordered by the Supreme Court in the investigation into the alleged leak of personal data of Isabel Díaz Ayuso The partner may conduct another investigation into matters that are not related to the case. This was explained in his parliamentary question to the Minister of the Presidency, Félix Bolaños.
“You are afraid of other things that may appear on the cell phone of the Attorney General,” he told him, to clarify: “emails, compromising conversations, even new crimes by García Ortiz or others which the Civil Guard will have to investigate. “It’s the doctrine of chance discovery,” explained the PP deputy spokesperson. “Keep this sentence, forgive life, find chance,” he told Bolaños.
Álvarez de Toledo even anticipated the topics on which the Civil Guard and the Supreme Court should seek information in the Attorney General’s communications. “It didn’t occur to you to maneuver against Ayuso’s boyfriend or in favor of Begoña Gómez or for the benefit of Puigdemont against the discretion of the prosecutors, did it?”
Although the reason why the communications were intercepted concerns Alberto González Amador y Ayuso, the PP deputy proposed diverting the investigation to other subjects: “The emails and conversations seized coincide with the date of approval of the law of amnesty and the first steps of Justice against the political and family environment of the President of the Government. Do you know who is on the cover of issue 8? [de marzo de este año, fecha inicial de la incautación de la información]? You welcome the amnesty law.
Judge Ángel Hurtado authorized the Central Operational Unit of the Civil Guard to copy and take all the emails and cell messages of the Attorney General from March until today. Seven months of professional and private communications from Álvaro García Ortiz which, as the public prosecutor denounced in writing before the judge, contain “information likely to compromise state security”.
Even if the cloning of information was global and indiscriminate, Judge Hurtado explained from the beginning that only messages related to the case should be collected: the alleged leak to the press of information about the tax fraud case of Alberto González Amador, a couple of Isabel Diaz Ayuso. But in the same vein, he also left the door open for the UCO to extract anything that he thought might appear to be a crime.
“In the event of a chance discovery,” the judge said, the Supreme Court official was responsible for recording and collecting the identified material, referring to the time of the search. If that day the Civil Guard seized something outside of what the judge had requested because they considered that it could be evidence of another crime unrelated to Alberto González Amador, a new judicial authorization would be necessary.
A limited search
Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo’s proposal that the Supreme Court take all the seized material and investigate whether there is anything else contradicts, in principle, the orders of Ángel Hurtado: the expert analysis of emails and messages, he said in an order of the last eight November, “this is limited to the dates which cover” a few days of March 2024. And all their orders specify that only elements related to the case must be analyzed.
The doctrine of accidental discovery that the PP representative speaks of has been nuanced and filed by the Supreme Court and the prosecution over the past five years. “Public authorities cannot interfere in the private lives of suspects, by intercepting their communications, for the sole purpose of blindly investigating their conduct,” the Supreme Court said on one occasion.
It is not impossible to open a new case when evidence of another type of crime is obtained during a search or telephone intervention. But over the past two decades, Spain has been repeatedly condemned precisely for irregularities in obtaining this type of evidence. “It will be necessary to assess and justify that the chance discovery was not obtained fraudulently, that is to say by accepting measures which – under the protection of the investigation into another crime – were really aimed at discovering offenses for which there was no basis for investigation,” the prosecution established in a 2019 circular.
